You would expect me to write about teachers who help me master Grammar or Vocabulary, taught me spelling and how to enunciate words. Well, sometimes we don’t get what we expect.
Most of us grew up with teachers who are amazing, the type of people we look up to. At least in our imaginations. I grew up meeting a few teachers who were really cool and a few teachers who really make me want to smack my head since I couldn’t smack theirs.
I remember once going for a new place, a home tuition (it was still legal back then) for English. During the first lesson, the teacher corrected me when I called the 3rd day of the week as Tuesday. Let’s consider Sunday as the 1st day. That would have made me right. The teacher said that it was Thursday, not Tuesday. I asked him what was the 5th day then? He told me Tuesday. So in his book, it would go like Sunday, Monday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. The moment I got on my mom’s car on the way back home, I told mom everything and that I don’t want to continue taking tuition here. Mom agreed.
Then, there was this other teacher who loved pronouncing Then as Ten, and Ten as Then. She would sound like, “I brushed my teeth at then. Ten, I went to sleep.” I couldn’t get out of my class since it was school. She overdoes the pronunciation thing with her tongue. Seeing that pink, wriggly, muscle-y thing between her teeth as the words come out… th..EN…. I had to grit my teeth through the whole year.
There were a couple of teachers with idiosyncrasies that made them who they are. We used to use chalks and blackboards back then and the flying powdery chalk was and is still quite hazardous to the respiratory system. I had a moustachey teacher who uses the chalk very rarely, and when he did he would scrap the board as if he feared the board would cry out in pain. He would 'grip' the chalk with just his forefinger and his thumb. And most of the time, what he wrote, we could do without. Maybe he just likes picturing himself torturing the blackboard.
When I was in Year 5, our Maths teacher had the thickest rotan you've ever seen. Lucky for us and for all other students in that school, the rotan was for show and not for use. She used it very effectively, scaring us into thinking she wouldn't hesitate to use it, if necessary. She never did.
We, however, did have to recite our multiplication tables... in BM, which is a bulky kind of language considering nine which are 'jiu' in Chinese, "gao" in Cantonese and Hokkien, 'kiu' in hakka, 'nueve' in Spanish, 'kyu' in Japanese and so on and so forth, but 'sem-bi-lan' in Malay Language or as we call it, BM.
It can be quite tiring.
We had to recite it from 2 until 12, till she arrives in class. So, here's what we did. We left someone guarding at the door. We did our thing. When the teacher leaves the staffroom, a distance away, the lookout would inform us and we would start from the 4th or 5th multiplication tables, just to make it believable. There was only once when she was very late, (come to think of it, she was always late) and we finished the 12th tables and was left not knowing what to do.
There weren't any teachers in particular that I would have loved to hate. They're all just doing their jobs. But I do hate teachers who were really lazy, who couldn't be bothered and who just came to be a waste of space in the staffroom. Yes, we did have those even though I believe the teachers all over Malaysia during my schooling era were among the best. I can't remember any of them now. Perhaps I shouldn't try. They'd still be a waste of space.. in my memory bank.
I had this music teacher, Teacher Linda, who I love to bits. I got nothing to complain about her. She, on the other hand, might complain about how un-hardworking I was with my organ practices. I wonder where she is now.
My best teacher was Auntie Christine. I was told to call her that. She had a hard time teaching me during tuition about the difference between You and I because I kept referring to her as Aunty Christine.
No, say This is for me, that is for you.
This is for me, that is for .. Auntie Christine.
No, That is for you.
For you…
Say it again.
This is for me, that is for… Auntie Christine.
O_o|||
I know, I was cute like that when I was five. Bet she lost more than a few strands of hair when that happened. But she was lovely. And she came to my wedding, looking lovely still.
I was a smartass when I was a toddler, and was still one by the time I hit primary school. I love quizzes and exams. Perhaps too much. A teacher passed us our marked English quiz papers when I was in Year 1, or was it Year 2. I almost scored the paper but got 98 because of a mistake. My teacher made sure the whole class knew.
The picture showed a bird, but there’s this ‘clever’ girl who wrote parrot instead. So I cut her marks!
It was a cruel, cruel thing to do to an eager 7-year-old, but it taught me the importance of reading the instructions and following them. The teacher drew a parrot alright, but perhaps it was not in the syllabus, and the fact that the word ‘bird’ was in the box of choices whereas ‘parrot’ was not, didn’t help. My father found it funny and stroked my head. My mother did the responsible thing. “That will teach you to follow orders. Now stop crying and do better next time.”
That’s how I was, an earlier version of Hermione Granger, if you will. I didn’t study Potions or fight Death Eaters though. I just grew up in the midst of this sub-species of humans called teachers.
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